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When I Was Young & in My Prime

2006 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD NOMINEE & NATIONAL BESTSELLER"A deeply humane, deeply human book." - Michael Crummey "Moving, funny, full of hard truths." - Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail What's left of us when we're gone? In When I Was Young and In My Prime, a young woman watches her grandparents begin to decline. As she sorts through the couple's belongings, she reflects on the untold stories and unsung bonds that make up our lives. Meanwhile, modern urban life places strains on her own marriage and on her sense of what, ultimately, we owe each other.Weaving together voices, diary entries, poems, conversations and lists, When I Was Young and In My Prime cuts to the heart of our search for intimacy and family, for what makes life meaningful and love real. The result is a smart, moving novel about personal and cultural decline, dignity and work, the urban and the rural, the old and the new, and the search for something ageless.

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Munce explores the nature of memory, the ways in which we cement our recollections and make them a part of our identity. It's also a meditation on how fragile and fleeting this memory can be -- what happens when we begin to lose it? Who do we become? And what becomes of a shared past if the people implicated in the past are no longer there to hold it?

There is a sense of how these issues affect both the grandparents and the narrator in this story. The narrative, themes and structure are braided into a whole, held together by a powerful sense of love between all three characters. It's very moving, both in its subject matter and the beautiful writing.